For 8,226 reviews, this publication has graded:
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49% higher than the average critic
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4% same as the average critic
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47% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.9 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 59
Score distribution:
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Positive: 3,670 out of 8226
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Mixed: 3,411 out of 8226
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Negative: 1,145 out of 8226
8,226
movie reviews
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 80
Mr. Lee, whose lean, straightforward documentary style loses none of his usual clarity and fire (the film has been exceptionally well shot by Ellen Kuras), summons a powerful sense of Birmingham's past and a galvanizing sense of how this bombing would change its future. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 80
A gorgeous entertainment, a feast of blood, passion and silk brocade. But though the picture is full of swirling, ecstatic motion, it is not especially moving. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 80
This is life as it’s lived, not dreamed. And this is a family bound not only by sorrow, but also by a shared history that emerges in 114 calibrated minutes and ends with a wallop. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 90
The brilliance of Borat is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 100
Grace is also what defines Mr. Bahrani's filmmaking. I can't think of anything else to call the quality of exquisite attention, wry humor and wide-awake intelligence that informs every frame of this almost perfect film. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 90
Mr. Demme has captured both the look and the spirit of this live performance with a daring and precision that match the group's own. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 100
The importance of seeing, seeing the world deeply, is at the heart of this quietly devastating, humanistic work from the South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong.- Posted Feb 10, 2011
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 100
This is not a work of film history but rather a generous, touching and slightly daffy expression of unbridled movie love.- Posted Nov 25, 2011
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 100
Prepare yourself for something very special...Here's a severely beautiful, mysterious movie that, as if by magic, liberates the romantic imagination. [16 Oct 1993] -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 70
This angular and intelligent romantic comedy isn't entirely consistent. Even as you laugh, it's a movie you admire more than love. -
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Critic Score 100
Excellent quasidocumentary, which sends shivers down the spine. (Review of Original Release) -
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Critic Score 100
Meaningful in its implications, as well as loaded with interest and suspense, High Noon is a western to challenge “Stagecoach” for the all-time championship. (Review of Original Release) -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 100
A few scenes serve as hinges joining this movie to "Flags of Our Fathers." While Letters From Iwo Jima seems to me the more accomplished of the two films -- by which I mean that it strikes me as close to perfect -- the two enrich each other, and together achieve an extraordinary completeness. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 90
Its low-key affect and decidedly human scale endow Once with an easy, lovable charm that a flashier production could never have achieved. The formula is simple: two people, a few instruments, 88 minutes and not a single false note. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 100
There are few concert movies that were filmed were such abiding feeling and respect. It's of a potent vintage that goes down deceptively smoother with age. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 90
Like a Ken Loach drama stripped to bare bones, The Arbor springs to life in the bright bitterness of Dunbar's prose, showcased in alfresco performances of contentious scenes from the play.- Posted Apr 27, 2011
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 100
It's surely the best depiction of teenage eccentricity since "Rushmore," and its incisive satire of the boredom and conformity that rule our thrill-seeking, individualistic land, and also its question-mark ending, reminded me of "The Graduate." -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 100
Brazil may not be the best film of the year, but it's a remarkable accomplishment for Mr. Gilliam, whose satirical and cautionary impulses work beautifully together. His film's ambitious visual style bears this out, combining grim, overpowering architecture with clever throwaway touches. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 90
A fascinating and fine-grained reconstruction of that period in its subject's life, a time when he (Capote) pursued literary glory and flirted with moral ruin. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 90
Might be described as an epic landscape film, a sweetly comic coming-of-age story or a lyrical work of social realism. But the setting -- a windswept, sparely populated steppe in southern Kazakhstan -- gives the movie a mood that sometimes feels closer to that of science fiction. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 90
Like its hero, who is brave without a trace of bravado, Overlord is unusually quiet and thoughtful. The scale and ambition of combat movies has usually been epic, but this one is disarmingly lyrical and subjective. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 90
Remarkable as much for its speculative restraint as for its philosophical reach. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 90
Recoing's performance is a sensitive portrayal of a man in the throes of an excruciating spiritual crisis. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 100
It reimagines the buddy film with such freshness and vigor that the genre seems positively new. -
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Critic Score 80
Moviemaking of a rare and high order. (Review of Original Release) -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 90
I can't remember the last time the movies yielded up a love story so painful, so tender and so true. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 90
The movie is at once a giddy mixture of farce, satire and opera buffa and a closely observed drama of social dislocation and cultural confusion. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 80
Beautifully shot by the French cinematographer Georges Périnal (whose credits include Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet"), the film soon evolves from a claustrophobic domestic affair into a mordantly discomfiting look at the betrayal of innocence. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 100
Inside Job, a sleek, briskly paced film whose title suggests a heist movie, is the story of a crime without punishment, of an outrage that has so far largely escaped legal sanction and societal stigma. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 90
Never has a film so strongly been a product of a director's respect for its source. Mr. Jackson uses all his talents in the service of that reverence, creating a rare perfect mating of filmmaker and material. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 90
Doesn't try to cram messages of uplift down its audience's gullet. It's a great eggscape from banality. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 70
That film does have its attractions, notably in its two solid leads and standout support from Mr. Pearce.- Posted Dec 11, 2010
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 70
Passages of glorious imagination are invariably matched by stock characters and banal story choices. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 90
Director Alfonso Cuarón works with a quicksilver fluidity, and the movie is fast, funny, unafraid of sexuality and finally devastating. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 100
A supremely elegant and thoughtful parable. [14 September 1994, p. C11] -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 90
Making sure that computer-generated animation will never be the same. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 90
Not for the faint of heart, though it has no scenes of overt violence, and barely a tear is shed. It is also strangely thrilling, not only because of the quiet assurance of Mr. Kore-eda's direction, but also because of his alert, humane sense of sympathy. -
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 90
Life Is Sweet, a title that should not be taken as irony, demands that the audience accept its meandering manner without expectations of the big dramatic event or the boffo laugh. It is very funny, but without splitting the sides.- Posted Jun 3, 2013
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 80
The Dardennes know how to build a scene for maximum tension: you yearn to find out who bought Jimmy, and whether his fate lies with a childless couple or an organ mill. But because they make moral thrillers, what matters isn't only actions and events but their emotional, spiritual and psychological costs. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 90
Ms. Armstrong instantly demonstrates that she has caught the essence of this book's sweetness and cast her film uncannily well, finding sparkling young actresses who are exactly right for their famous roles. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 90
The Spirit of the Beehive, like "Cinema Paradiso," also takes place at the particular intersection of reality and fantasy defined by youthful moviegoing. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 100
Shakespeare meets Sherlock, and makes for pure enchantment in the inspired conjecture behind Shakespeare in Love. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 80
Coming in at a tight 75 minutes, this strikingly original travelogue glides on the lovely lilt of Mr. Santos's Portuguese narration.- Posted Mar 24, 2011
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 90
Part of what's bracing about Gomorrah, and makes it feel different from so many American crime movies, is both its deadly serious take on violence and its global understanding of how far and wide the mob's tentacles reach, from high fashion to the very dirt. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 100
Full of brilliantly executed coups de théâtre, showing the director's natural flair for spectacle. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 80
A marvelous toy. It's funny, it's full of tricks and it manages to be royally entertaining, which is really all it aims for. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 80
In the words of Mr. Kramer: "The government didn't get us the drugs. No one else got us the drugs. We, Act Up, got those drugs out there. That is the proudest achievement that the gay population of this world can ever claim."- Posted Sep 20, 2012
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 100
Merchant, Ivory and Jhabvala triumph again with their entertaining, richly textured film. [13 March 1992] -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 90
The animation is a marvel - all the more so because the most demanding sequences seem almost casually tossed off. The world of Wallace and Gromit is one of the few genuinely eccentric places left in the movies, a place where lumpy, doughy characters achieve a peculiar dignity in spite of their grotesque features and the ridiculousness of their circumstances. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 100
Post-Soviet Russia in Andrei Zvyagintsev's somber, gripping film Elena is a moral vacuum where money rules, the haves are contemptuous of the have-nots, and class resentment simmers. The movie, which shuttles between the center of Moscow and its outskirts, is grim enough to suggest that even if you were rich, you wouldn't want to live there.- Posted May 17, 2012
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 90
It succeeds at showing how one man's psychic wounds contributed to an art that transmutes personal pain into garish visual satire. -
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 90
It is galvanizing because of Al Pacino's splendid performance in the title role and because of the tremendous intensity that Mr. Lumet brings to this sort of subject. (Review of Original Release) -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 100
Sustains a documentary authenticity that is as astonishing as it is offhand. Even when you're on the edge of your seat, it never sacrifices a calm, clear-sighted humanity for the sake of melodrama or cheap moralizing. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 90
It represents something stranger and, to those of us with only a secondhand or thirdhand knowledge of that history, more disturbing: a survivor's conviction that there were aspects of the experience itself that can only be described as beautiful. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 100
If there's one movie that ought to be studied by military and civilian leaders around the world at this treacherous historical moment, it is The Fog of War, Errol Morris's sober, beautifully edited documentary portrait of the former United States defense secretary Robert S. McNamara. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 90
Encountered in an appropriately exploratory frame of mind, it can produce something close to bliss.- Posted Mar 4, 2011
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 100
Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 100
A quietly rapturous film about love and redemption.- Posted Mar 15, 2012
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 90
Childhood ends, this time forever, with tears and howls, swirls of smoke, the shock of mortality and bittersweet smiles in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the grave, deeply satisfying final movie in the series.- Posted Jul 13, 2011
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 90
Certainly one of the strangest and most interesting movies of the year, and I suspect that in years to come a number of other strange and interesting movies will show traces of its influence. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 80
The evenness of its emotional pitch almost incidentally helps the film become an unusually deep exploration of sports, machismo and the competitive spirit. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 80
Fortunately, Hicks's direction has an elegance and dignity that rescue Shine from the exploitative and give the film an acute, genuinely sensitive style. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 100
Mr. Herzog is also no ordinary filmmaker. It is the rare documentary like Grizzly Man, which has beauty and passion often lacking in any type of film, that makes you want to grab its maker and head off to the nearest bar to discuss man's domination of nature and how Disney's cute critters reflect our profound alienation from the natural order. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 90
It weaves life and art into a rich tapestry of love, loss and compassion. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 100
A stunning feat of literary adaptation as well as a purely cinematic triumph. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 90
In many respects Ceausescu turns out to be as much the author of this brilliant documentary as the director, Andrei Ujica, who waded through more than 1,000 hours of filmed state propaganda, official news reports and home movies to create a cinematic tour de force that tracks the rise, reign and grim fall of its subject.- Posted Sep 8, 2011
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 100
It's hard to imagine anyone but Mr. Pitt in the role. He's relaxed yet edgy and sometimes unsettling.- Posted Sep 22, 2011
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 100
With marvelous discipline, Mr. Shapiro crams a wealth of material into a tight 77 minutes, smoothly communicating the group effort required to achieve the perfect shot.- Posted Oct 31, 2012
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Critic Score 80
Under the direction of James (''The Terminator'') Cameron, [the special effects team has] put together a flaming, flashing, crashing, crackling blow-'em-up show that keeps you popping from your seat despite your better instincts and the basically conventional scare tactics. -
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- Posted Apr 28, 2011
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Reviewed by
Dave Kehr 90
If Mr. Ghobadi's dominant theme is the devastation of the Kurds, his subdominant tone is one of strength, resistance and fertility. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 100
Go see this movie. Take your children, even though they may occasionally be confused or fidgety. Boredom and confusion are also part of democracy, after all. Lincoln is a rough and noble democratic masterpiece - an omen, perhaps, that movies for the people shall not perish from the earth.- Posted Nov 8, 2012
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 90
Its effects seem more like those of a poem or a piece of music than a movie. Requires the reverent darkness and communal solitude of a theater. -
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Critic Score 100
Astonishing... One of the freshest American films of the decade. [4 Aug 1989] -
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 70
Mr. Coppola, the writer as well as the director, has nearly succeeded in making a great film but has, instead, made one that is merely very good. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 90
This devastating film persuasively portrays them (Tillman family) as finer, more morally sturdy people than the cynical chain of command that lied to them and used their son as a propaganda tool. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 70
In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker's calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit (or, better yet, a moral tale). -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 100
An irresistible black comedy and a wicked delight. [27 Sept 1995] -
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Critic Score 70
The predictable surface of Say Anything is constantly being cracked by characters who think and talk like real people and by John Cusack's terrifically natural, appealing Lloyd. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 90
When this hugely ambitious project began, it was a longitudinal study of class divisions among English schoolchildren. But time and persistence have turned it into much more. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 90
Switching gears radically, bravely defying conventional wisdom about what it takes to excite moviegoers, Lynch presents the flip side of "Blue Velvet" and turns it into a supremely improbable triumph. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 100
With its careful, unassuming naturalism, its visual thrift and its emotional directness, Million Dollar Baby feels at once contemporary and classical, a work of utter mastery that at the same time has nothing in particular to prove. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 80
The interest of To Be and to Have, though, is not sociological: it is not really about the French educational system, rural life or even the way children learn. It is, rather, the portrait of an artist, a man whose work combines discipline and inspiration and unfolds mysteriously and imperceptibly. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 100
It is outrageously funny without ever exaggerating for comic effect, and heartbreaking with only minimal melodramatic embellishment. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 90
Stunning...a film much tougher and more transfixing than its wan title. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 90
What makes the performance(s) even better is that Mr. Irons invests these bizarre, potentially freakish characters with so much intelligence and so much real feeling. [23 Sept 1988, p.C10] -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 100
The 3-D is sometimes less than transporting, and the chanting voices in the composer Ernst Reijseger's new-agey score tended to remind me of my last spa massage. Yet what a small price to pay for such time traveling!- Posted Apr 28, 2011
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 70
With the exception of Nicholson, its good things are familiar things - the rock score, the lovely, sometimes impressionistic photography by Laszlo Kovacs, the faces of small-town America. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 90
Gives you the steady pulse of life in a beautiful city viewed through the eyes of a character who, in spite of tragic loss and increasing decrepitude, knows in his bones that he is one of the luckiest men alive. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 100
When a film as profoundly quiet as In the Bedroom comes along, it feels almost miraculous, as if a shimmering piece of art had slipped below the radar and through the minefield of commerce. -
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 70
Mr. Polanski and Mr. Towne attempted nothing so witty and entertaining, being content instead to make a competently stylish, more or less thirites-ish movie that continually made me wish I were back seeing "The Maltese Falcon" or "The Big Sleep." Others may not be as finicky. [21 June 1974] -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 100
Barbara is a film about the old Germany from one of the best directors working in the new: Christian Petzold. For more than a decade Mr. Petzold has been making his mark on the international cinema scene with smart, tense films that resemble psychological thrillers, but are distinguished by their strange story turns, moral thorns, visual beauty and filmmaking intelligence.- Posted Dec 20, 2012
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 100
Of Gods and Men is supple and suspenseful, appropriately austere without being overly harsh, and without forgoing the customary pleasures of cinema. The performances are strong, the narrative gathers momentum as it progresses, and the camera is alive to the beauty of the Algerian countryside.- Posted Feb 24, 2011
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 90
The images are as delightful, unexpected and playfully uninhibited as Ms. Varda, perhaps the only filmmaker who has both won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and strolled around an art exhibition while costumed as a potato (not at the same time). -
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